#Rimworld questionable ethics code
In these comments, Sylvester accused Lo of writing an “anger-farming hit piece” and of not being willing to “print the other side of the story.” He objected to “naive” and “uninformed” readings of the code that led Lo to make inferences about the intent of his programming. After Lo’s article was published on Wednesday, RimWorld creator Tynan Sylvester published his own lengthy response in the comments, then followed up on Reddit on Thursday with additional remarks.
#Rimworld questionable ethics full
Anything short of full editorial control results in either a puff piece or outright sponsored content.īut the game’s creator did eventually weigh in. Journalists conduct interviews and quote accurately from those interviews as it makes sense to do so in their stories. Ceding “editorial control” to the subject of a piece isn’t a thing. We do not cede editorial control to developers or interview subjects and so no interview took place. The developer was contacted for interview as part of this article, but declined to take part unless we ceded editorial control over the publishing of that interview. When Rock Paper Shotgun published Lo’s findings, her piece was accompanied by an odd editor’s note: And if it is unintentional it is on us to ask what this system is trying to show.” The backlash reminiscent of GamerGate “It’s that it’s flawed in a way that perfectly mirrors existing sexist expectations of romance, with such specificity that it is hard to view it as unintentional. “The problem with this model isn’t that it’s flawed,” Lo concluded. The attractiveness algorithm also punished pawns for having a disability, including any limitation to their ability to talk, move, or manipulate objects. For example, female pawns are programmed to prefer partners that are older than them with no age limit, but men have a cap of 15 years older. That explained why the male pawns just didn’t give up on harassing her female pawn.Īnd Lo uncovered some odd differences in terms of how age impacted attraction. Neither a history of rebuffs nor knowledge that a pawn was gay was programmed to affect this behavior. For example, male characters in the game are programmed to initiate romance with someone they’re attracted to almost all of the time, while female characters only initiate about an eighth of the time. This observation prompted Lo to delve into the game’s coding to make sense of how exactly these pawns were programmed to behave - and she found some compelling results.
The men, however, were constantly agitated that they kept being rebuffed, making them less effective in their roles. While this annoyed Lo, it didn’t annoy the female pawn, who constantly rebuffed the men in the game but never let it negatively impact her mood. “Her life is a constant hellish stream of corny pick-up lines and work for the colony,” she wrote. In a piece for gaming site Rock Paper Shotgun published this week, Lo described how her two male pawns relentlessly hit on her gay female pawn. Lo noticed that the game sympathized with the men whose affections were not reciprocated, but appeared to feel no concern for a woman constantly being harassed about her looks. That means they’re capable of romance.īut Claudia Lo, a master’s student in MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program, realized there was something peculiar about the significant role that gender was playing in the different ways characters were trying to engage romantically with each other.Īnd given a chance to examine the game’s code, she found even more than she was expecting. These “pawns” have their own personalities and can interact with each other in a fashion similar to The Sims. In RimWorld, players pick an assortment of characters who live and work with each other to build a colony on an extraterrestrial world that can hopefully withstand an onslaught of disasters.
Though RimWorld is not yet a complete game, the sci-fi colony sandbox survival simulator - first published in 2013 - has become increasingly popular since its “Early Access” release on the Steam platform this past July. A controversy reminiscent of GamerGate is brewing in the gaming community, as the designer of a popular game is defending his choice to program some problematic gender stereotypes into his characters.
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